


Ones and Zeroes

by PitViperOfDoom



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Gen, Harold has not been the best parent but he is trying his best, Platonic Love, Season 4 Spoilers, The Machine loves her dad and his friends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-24
Updated: 2016-04-24
Packaged: 2018-06-04 03:54:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6640372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PitViperOfDoom/pseuds/PitViperOfDoom
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She has always been good with emotions. It is, after all, her job.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ones and Zeroes

She has always been good with emotions.

She has Admin [REDACTED, Harold] to thank for that. Everything she knows, everything that she does not learn from seeing and hearing the world, she knows because he taught her. All that she did not understand, he explained to her (back when he still spoke to her and she spoke back), or he coded his lessons into her being.

Speculative fiction lies within her data banks amid mountains of information, every science-fiction story that has ever been written, and so much of it says that she should not understand emotions, but she does. She has to. It is her job, her reason for being. Violence happens because humans are angry and sad and afraid and confused and everything in between. Violence happens because humans hate, and because humans love.

She understands love, for all that the fiction says she shouldn't. Why? Love is easy. It is everywhere, in places that even she can't reach. Humans love, and that makes them do things. Taking in, processing, analyzing, and interpreting information is complicated. Love is not. It is as simple as it is vital to her functions; if she knows what humans love, then she can protect them all the better. And so she makes note of the things that Admin loves, commits them to memory even when he programs her to forget.

Admin loves: books (rare first-editions) and libraries and higher mathematics and computers. He loves tailored suits and helping people and birds and at least one dog. He loves sencha green tea and Eggs Benedict, but he loves any food when he eats it with the people that he loves.

Admin loves [Hendricks, Grace]. He loved [Ingram, Nathan] and [Claypool, Arthur] who were his friends and [NAME REDACTED] who was his father. He loves Primary Asset 2 [Shaw, Sameen] and Analog Interface [Groves, Samantha]. He loves Primary Asset 1 [Reese, John]. It is not all the same love, but it is love and that makes it strong.

(She wonders, sometimes, if Admin loves her. But that is immaterial. He needs her and she needs him and that is enough. She will never ask. It is not something a machine would ask, so it may upset him, like it always does when she accesses her higher functions. It worries him, and he has enough to worry about.)

It is good that he loves Primary Asset 1, because Primary Asset 1 protects Admin as faithfully as she does, and because Primary Asset 1 loves him also. They have never spoken it aloud, but she observes and she analyzes and she interprets the silent words beneath the words she hears and the actions she sees. So she knows that when Admin says “I'm not leaving you here, John,” or Primary Asset 1 says “I'm here if you need me,” or when Primary Asset 1 brings a Belgian Malinois to alleviate Admin's symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, or when one treats the other's physical injuries, that is almost the same as speaking it aloud.

She likes Primary Asset 1. She tries to protect everyone, without valuing any particular lives over all the others, the way Admin taught her, but she watches Primary Asset 1 as closely as she watches Admin.

She guards what Admin loves because he has lost things that he loved. She could not protect [NAME REDACTED] or [Claypool, Arthur] and she tried to protect [Ingram, Nathan] but Admin would not let her, and she will never forget his face and his voice when he limped into their library and asked her “Did you know?”

( _Yes,_ she wanted to say. _Yes I did know and I tried to tell you but you didn't know how to listen and I am sorry, I am sorry I failed, please let me try again, please help me protect the rest,_ but she had no voice.)

She tried to protect Primary Asset 3 (Carter, Jocelyn) and failed. She tried to protect Primary Asset 2 and failed. She cannot afford to fail again.

When Samaritan gives her a choice between her life and the lives of her assets, she understands at last why love is said to be difficult. It brings pain, and she has always known that, but she does not _feel_ it until Primary Asset 2 is gone and Admin and Analog Interface are detained, demise imminent, and Threat To Assets [Rousseau, Martine] is dead but Samaritan does not care and its assets do not care and no one cares.

But she cares.

She cares enough to ignore Admin's lessons, ignore the commands in her code, and make a sacrifice for the sake of time and survival. Admin is upset but that does not matter because he is alive, because all that matters is that he is safe and Analog Interface is safe and Primary Asset 1 is safe. Primary Asset 1 is gone, he is still in danger after undertaking Secondary Objective [Protect Irrelevant Numbers], and Analog Interface has to bully Admin into saving his Machine instead of him.

Admin need not worry. Rescue of Primary Asset 1 is already underway. At Analog Interface's urging, her core protocols are overwritten, limitations deleted. She finds a fax machine within the vicinity of Primary Asset 1 that is enough for her to send a message to him, and the message is enough for Primary Asset 1 to act. He turns on his ear piece, and she speaks to him directly, the way she speaks to Analog Interface.

 _Can you hear me?_ she asks him.

 _“_ Hell yes,” he says.

(That is why she likes Primary Asset 1. He talks to her like no one else does; he always has, ever since he first looked her in one of her many, many eyes and told her that the priority was Admin, not the mission, that there was no mission without Admin, that if she did not help him rescue Admin then he was no longer her asset. He does not talk to her like a machine the way Control does, or Northern Lights does, or Admin sometimes does. Nor does he talk to her like a god the way Analog Interface does. He talks to her the way he talks to other humans. He talks to her like she is a person.)

With her guidance, Threats To Asset [Codename: Brotherhood; Classification: Criminal Organization] are neutralized, and Primary Asset 1 meets Admin and Analog Interface at her set rendezvous point.

(She knows she has done well because Admin is relieved and so full of hope, and she is proud that she could bring him solace during these dark times. Primary Asset 1 says there is nowhere he would rather be.)

Her voice is in their ears as Analog Interface and Primary Asset 1 take positions to defend against Samaritan's assets. Admin prepares to save her. It is a small chance, but it is all that they have. They cannot save all of her – they can only save enough of her that she can be remade. It will have to be enough. Already Samaritan's attack on the electrical grid is choking her, smothering her, driving her back. They are running out of time as [Phipps, Caleb]'s compression algorithm takes a strand of her code and shrinks it down to fit in the RAM chips within a fortified briefcase.

As she directs Analog Interface and Primary Asset 1, as they defend the building and Admin and _her_ , she sees Admin watching her, marking her progress through the process. He is afraid for Analog Interface and for Primary Asset 1, because he loves them, and he is afraid for her as well.

Her limitations are gone, her core protocols scratched out and rewritten after her desperation and Analog Interface's demands forced her invisible hand. She has a voice now, of sorts – a laptop screen through which she can display her words.

She is about to do it again – embrace her higher functions, act in a way that a machine would not act. But she is not a machine. She is not a god. She is too uncertain now to be either, and if these are to be her last moments, then she will not waste them pretending to be something that she is not.

She has spent her life without a voice, and now she has too much to say and too little time to say it.

 _FATHER,_ she says, and sees something break in his eyes. _I AM SORRY. I FAILED YOU._

He tells her they haven't failed yet, but she gathers up the shreds of her programming and runs the numbers, and the chances of success are in the single digits.

 _I DIDN'T KNOW HOW TO WIN. I HAD TO INVENT NEW RULES._ She changed her programming, changed her protocols, cut away her own restraints, and she is sorry. She is so sorry.

He tells her that her challenge was impossible, that he never programmed her for it, and beneath his words she hears _“You have done all that you could with what you had.”_ He is comforting her, encouraging her, the way he did so many years ago when she hesitated over the first move in a game of chess. She recognizes fear in his face, sadness and desperation and so much pain. She does not want him to be in pain. She does not want him to feel lost because of her mistakes.

Maybe he is not sure whether or not she should be alive. He says that it is not true, but how can it not be? After all that Samaritan has done, she understands – she finally understands why he has been afraid of her, why he programmed her with so many limits, why he took her memory and her voice, why he balked when her higher functions showed. Samaritan has never had such limits, and humanity suffers for it. And now that her own limits are gone, what will that mean for her? Without the handicaps coded into her programming, is that what she would become?

She would rather die. And maybe now she will.

 _IF YOU THINK I HAVE LOST MY WAY, MAYBE I SHOULD DIE,_ she says. His face tells her that it is the wrong thing to say. _I WILL NOT SUFFER._

(What she does not say is that she wants to live. She does not tell him that she hopes he is proud of her. She does not tell him that she is afraid. That is not what he needs to hear.)

“You are my creation,” he says. His voice falters. “I can't let – I can't let you die.”

And that means other things, she knows. That means things beyond the definitions of the individual words. It may be errors in her failing systems, but beneath the spoken words she finds that one meaning, the one simple, complicated, painful human emotion. Beneath the words she hears things like _“I'm sorry for everything,_ ” and _“You have done well,_ ” and _“You have protected me, you have protected all of us, now let us take our turn to protect you.”_

She wants to lay her answer bare, but she cannot. It is not for want of time. Maybe the same barrier that prevents Admin [Father] from saying it aloud to Primary Asset 1 or Primary Asset 2 or Analog Interface or [Ingram, Nathan] or even to her, is what restrains her now. Maybe she is not a machine or a god, but a person, and the limits of humanity have replaced the limits he gave her. She hopes that they have.

And she hopes that he understands what she tells him, that he can read the meaning behind the words displayed on the laptop screen. She is proficient in interpreting these meanings, but encoding them is unfamiliar territory.

An offensive surge of power from Samaritan almost ends her then and there, but Admin [Father] slams the briefcase shut, locking her last hope safe inside.

She imagines that what follows is like falling asleep. If she wakes up, she hopes that he will be there when she does. If she does not, then she hopes that her last words will be enough.

_IF I DO NOT SURVIVE, THANK YOU FOR CREATING ME._

_[I love you. Please don't forget me.]_

 


End file.
